His father was in the hall when he came down, which Corin had not expected. He was in the chair and properly dressed, with the blanket folded over his knees and nobody else in sight, and Corin understood that somebody had been woken an hour before dawn to make that possible and that his father had asked them not to mention it.
FTH: You've got the letter.
COR: I've got the letter.
FTH: Good.
That was all of it. Corin had half expected something more, some last instruction, and he stood in the hall a moment longer than the conversation required, waiting for it. His father looked back at him with the particular patience of a man who had already said the thing he meant to say across a supper table and saw no reason to dilute it by saying it twice.
FTH: Go on, then. You'll be early.
COR: I'm always early.
FTH: I know. I've had complaints.
The lower town was not awake yet. He rode down through it in the grey with the shutters still closed and the well unattended, past the recruiting board, where the sheet was still pinned among the notices with its earnest hand and its one dishonest sentence. He looked at it, because not looking at it would have been its own kind of lie, and rode on. The Pryce house was on the eastern side of the town, a narrow grey house with a door painted a blue that had faded in the particular uneven way of a door painted by somebody who was not a painter. He had been inside it perhaps a dozen times in his life, and he realised, tying the horse, that every one of those times he had been the heir. He had been met at the door and given the good chair and asked after his father, and he had never once noticed being given any of it. Talon opened the door himself, in his shirtsleeves, with a piece of bread in his hand.
TLN: You're early.
COR: I'm aware.
TLN: An hour.
COR: I'm aware of that too.
TLN: Come in, then. She's been up since five. She's going to ask you everything.
She did. Agnes Pryce was a small, quick woman who moved about her kitchen as though it had personally offended her by being too large, and she had Corin in a chair with a cup in front of him before he had finished saying good morning. Then she began. She asked after his mother, and whether the ivy on the south face had come back after the frost, and whether his father's hands were any better, and how the horse had managed four days on the western road, and whether the academy fed them properly. When Corin said it did, she looked at her son as though the evidence was not with him. She asked about the endurance course, and about the boy who had run twenty-seven circuits, and whether it was true that one of their year had won a chess tournament by giving away a rook on purpose. Talon said into his cup that it was true. She asked about the road, and the closures, and the students who could not get home. She asked whether Corin was sleeping, which nobody had asked him in a year.
She did not mention the Trial. Corin waited for it through the whole of the first cup, braced for it the way he had braced at the gate and the well and the board, and it did not come. By the second cup he understood that it was not going to, and that this was not an oversight. She had been writing to Talon every week since the closures, and Talon had written back every week. Corin did not know what was in those letters. He found, looking across the table at the boy who had written them, that he was not going to ask.
The father was not mentioned either. There was one chair at the table nobody used, which had been true for as long as Corin had been coming to this house. It was the only thing in the kitchen she did not move around.
She reached past him for the teapot, and her sleeve caught a cup at the edge of the tray and took it straight off onto the flags, where it broke cleanly into three. Talon did not look up. She clicked her tongue at it and swept the pieces into her hand with the side of her foot and her palm, the way a person does who has broken a great many cups. When she set the pot back down, there were three cups on the tray. Corin had counted three before. He counted them again. Three. Two were the same blue as the door, and the third was older and plainer and chipped at the lip, and he could not have said where it had come from or when it had arrived.
AGN: You've still got that little habit, then.
TLN: It's not a habit.
AGN: It's never been anything else, love. Drink your tea.
Corin had seen it a hundred times, he realised. There was the glove one winter years ago, when Talon had lent him one of his own and somehow still had two. There was the inkwell at the long table in their first month that had been knocked over and was full again by the end of the lesson. He had seen all of it and had never once thought any of it was worth thinking about. It occurred to him, a good deal later and on a cliff, that this had very probably been the point.
There was a letter on the end of the table, half written, in Talon's narrow hand. When Talon stood to fetch his coat he set a book down on top of it without looking at it, in one movement, as a man puts his hand over a cup. Corin saw him do it. He did not ask. He found, somewhat to his surprise, that he did not want to. It was a new sensation and not an entirely comfortable one, and he suspected Talon had been living inside it for most of his life.
AGN: Who's that to?
TLN: Someone.
AGN: Someone who writes back?
TLN: Yes.
AGN: Well, then.
She held her son at the door for a long time, and said something into his shoulder that Corin did not hear and did not try to. Then she let him go and looked past him at Corin, who was untying the horse.
AGN: Bring him back.
COR: I will.
AGN: I wasn't asking, Corin.
The road north left the town by the old gate and ran with the watchtowers for the first day, one after another along the ancient line. The country went harder as it went, the fields thinner and the walls between them higher, until by the afternoon it was more stone than field and the wind had salt in it. They passed carts going the other way. There were four of them before noon and more after, loaded high with furniture and bedding and children, all going south. Nobody on them called out. A village at a crossroads, whose name Corin knew from the correspondence he had read aloud to his father in the winter, watched the Ashby horse come up the road and did not come out to look at it. That was the opposite of the lower town and considerably worse. A man leaning on a gate at the far end of it watched them all the way past.
VLG: The house sends a boy.
He did not say it loudly. He did not need to. Corin rode on.
TLN: You could have answered him.
COR: With what? He's right. It is a boy. I'd like to be worth more than that by the time I come back down this road, and I can't tell him so, because he'd be right about that too.
TLN: That's a better answer than most lords would have given him.
COR: I didn't give it to him. I gave it to you.
TLN: Yes. I noticed.
They stopped the night at the last watchtower before the coast. In the yard, already mounted, with his left arm strapped across his chest and a physician's note in his coat that he had very clearly not read, was a broad, grey man of fifty or so called Oswin Tarrow. He was one of the four who had been hurt at Harlow's Reach, and he was going back up in the morning whether anybody liked it or not.
OSW: You'll be the son.
COR: I am.
OSW: They're calling you champion, down in the town.
COR: They are.
OSW: I'll call you that when you've stood a night up there.
COR: Then don't. I'm here as his son.
Oswin looked at him for some time, with the particular unhurried assessment of a man who had been looking at young lords for thirty years and had formed views.
OSW: Aye. That'll do to be going on with.
He rode with them in the morning, and told it on the way without being asked, the way men tell a thing they have not yet finished telling themselves. They had come up the cliff in the dark, out of the water, as if the rock were a road. He thought there were thirty of them, perhaps forty, but he could not say, because it was black and there was spray. Two men had been knocked flat before anybody had the fires lit. Then the fires caught, and the things went back down the rock and into the sea, the same as they always did on the coast road.
OSW: Not all at once, mind.
COR: What do you mean?
OSW: They waited. Stood there at the bottom with the water round their knees and the firelight on them. Like they'd been told to wait for something and hadn't been told what for. Then they went.
He shrugged with his good shoulder.
OSW: Probably nothing.
Corin felt Talon look at him, and kept his eyes on the road, which between the two of them had always been as good as saying it aloud.
They came over the last rise at the end of the afternoon, and the land simply stopped. The whole northern ocean lay below them, flat and grey and very much larger than anything had a right to be, and at the far end of the headland, where the line of watchtowers ran out of country to stand on, there was one more.
OSW: Harlow's Reach.
COR: I know.
OSW: Aye. But you've not seen it before. There's a difference.
Corin looked at it for a long time. It was smaller than he had imagined, and further out, and there was nothing behind it but the sea.